Spice Club — Restaurant in East Lyme

I'm kind of sad to write this because Spice Club used to be one of the places my family and I liked going when I'd come home to visit. Now we probably won't ever go back.

First, the hostess disappeared FOUR times before seating us, each time apologizing and saying she'd "be right back." It was super weird and awkward. Our server, although nice, was not knowledgeable about the menu. They had a prix fixe "mothers day special" and one of the dinner options was "wonton pad thai with shrimp and tofu." I asked what it was and he said "Oh, it's just like a regular pad thai with some wontons."

My mom and I ordered it, but explained we had a SERIOUS, life-threatening shrimp allergy and asked if that was something he could accommodate; he assured us there would be no issues and that we could do chicken and tofu instead. Our food took FOREVER to arrive and when it did, the pad thai looked like the one he described (rice noodles, some wontons, etc.) but had tons of shrimp all over it. We had to send it back. When they finally brought the "corrected" pad thai out, it was simply a dish of fried wonton strips, laden in grease, with a few pieces of chicken sprinkled on top (no tofu)... That's NOT pad thai and honestly it was so greasy and disgusting. It was not what was brought the first time with shrimp and DEFINITELY not what the server described.

Other issues we encountered: Our server came up and asked if i would like more water. I said yes, that'd be great. Then he grabbed my uneaten appetizer away from me instead of my water glass... I have no clue why... When a server was filling our water glasses, she literally spilled water all over the chair next to my mom (she overfilled her glass a TON) and didn't apologize or clean it up; she just disappeared. My mom had to clean it up, and then getting replacement napkins for her was a struggle. My brother couldn't make it out with us, so we ordered a couple of their higher priced special sushi rolls for him. I don't think their sushi chefs know how to make sushi... We paid over $30 for the two rolls. One of them had 8 pieces and one had six. They were a MESS; there's NO way we would have paid that much for that quality sushi. Also, we were waiting at LEAST 30-40 minutes for the sushi.

So disappointing. I hope this place either gets it together or that another similar, more competent...

Update: After no owner response and checking out other recent reviews I noticed they respond fairly often to 5 star reviews and not as often to the negative. I am very disappointed that the owners don't seem to care about negative experiences that people have at their establishment. When we order 3 kani salads and all 3 are filled with dirty looking water at the bottom is unacceptable. Especially for someone with stage 4 cancer that is currently going through treatment and my immune system is extremely compromised I expected higher standards at a more expensive restaurant. This besides being disgusting in a normal situation could have ended up very easily with me becoming very sick from having dirty water in my salad. Not to to mention that the waitress STILL brought us a bill with all 3 salads on it and when I asked why we were charged for them in the condition they where brought out in she only took 2 of them off the bill. Very sad that the owners don't seem to care about people having poor experiences. Glad my review has over 4,000 views and at least their customer base is seeing it.

The food was almost amazing. The biggest disappointment (and the reason for the 2 lost stars) was that the Kani salads that the 3 of us ordered were not what we expected at all. I have never had a Kani salad anywhere that had so much lettuce. Everywhere else I have ordered it I received a dish that was primarily kani with dressing and masago. We initially noticed that the lettuce was so wet that it was splashing water all over the table, after looking closer at my bowl I noticed there was a huge amount of water in the bowl making my salad more of a soup (picture of water is atrached). All 3 of our bowls were filled with a significant amount of water. I brought this to the waitress's attention and she immediately apologized and offered to bring us all new salads, we did decline the replacement salads because it was such a turn off to have the $11 salads presented so poorly. Once we finished the meal I noticed all 3 salads were still on the receipt and I asked to have them taken off since we had all only had a few bites before we noticed, she only took 2 of the salads off at that time.

While the salad issue was a large downside, we did enjoy the rest of our meal and the sushi...

spring rolls and Thai iced tea were awesome but that's about it. lychee mojito made zero sense and was hard to drink as lychee and mint should never go together like that, but I knew that going into that drink. my girlfriend and I ordered 2 very different noodle dishes but what we got tasted exactly the same aside from the bell peppers and tomatoes in mine and the broccoli and carrots in hers. clearly the cook just made a big batch of noodles and threw a few different things in each dish. real problem is that the 2 dishes shouldn't have been the same at all! mine was drunken noodles, which happens to be one of my all time favorite things to cook and eat, and the sauce is supposed to be very thin and light and spicy, but mine was very thick, heavy and sticky sweet, and had absolutely zero spice and was practically inedible. it tasted like a bottle of sweet soy and a pound of brown sugar. I asked for some chili oil I could add but was informed that all they had was Sriracha. no where near the flavor I came in this place for. then when we got our bill we saw that the waitress had put a no spice note on all of our dishes which we never asked her to do in the first place. the whole experience seemed very condescending as if because we're not Asian we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between our dishes and that we couldn't handle the spice of our clearly advertised as spicy dishes. hopefully that's not the case but either way we were both very unhappy and are actually both feeling quite sick since our meal. 10/10 would...